Mundy wrote The Buzzard especially at the request of Cecilia McDowall, whose initially rather spiky setting, using octaves and ninths, sets the scene for a clever contrast at the moment the bird soars, with accelerating swooping music.

Percussive rhythm and pointillist effects propel this chant-like song depicting death as a beautiful woman marching on a road of bleached bones; difficult intervals, many sevenths and ninths.

You can't create a chord for it with three pitches each a half-step (or a major seventh or minor ninth, for that matter) apart.

1.3 Music The note which is higher by a ninth than the tonic of a diatonic scale or root of a chord.

The work lies far closer, at least in its harmonic thought, to American Modernism (say, Copland's music of the Twenties) than to what we might expect from familiar Creston - diatonic chords leavened with major sevenths and ninths.

1.4 Music A chord in which the ninth note of the scale forms an important component.